How To Break Up

I've been reading quite a bit lately, catching up on the last eight months, one might say. Anyways, I'm currently reading three and a half books and the latest one I picked up is written by one of my once-upon-a-time favourite fiction writers, only this time it is non-fiction. I haven't been too happy with what I have been reading and a thorough review will be forthcoming, but I'm sitting on my bed cross-legged in my shorts after my shower and reading when I came across the following passage,which, upon reading I burst out laughing with a belly-aching laugh and fell off my bed.

"If I had wanted to end my marriage it would have been easier. I'd say, 'We need to talk.' Then, 'It's not you, it's me.' Or, 'I just cant do this any more' (the current favourite phrase from relationship-enders), and that would be it. I'd be free!"
- Making It Up As I Go Along, Marian Keyes

Love Story in a Cemetary

 She stopped, and we set down the water. She looked over to a grave. 

"He died last year," she said. In front of his grave was a lush flower garden. She bent down to pull a few weeds. 

"We lived in a small apartment nearby," She said. "He always wanted to give me a garden." I told her I was sorry for her loss. 

"Don't be, dear," she said. "I loved him enough to want him to go first. I was always better at handling the difficulties." 

She smiled wide. "He was better at the lighter side of life. He may be gone but not everything is gone. He left me with enough good memories to see me through until it's my time."

— Paris Letters, Macleod

There are no more perfect moments

"I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, its quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy,  generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: it you think about it you don't do it."

— Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre

Review of the Day

Carson, through all of her work, writes about love as the atomic leveler of the self. Love is shit that smears us in its radiant nakedness; it can’t really be survived. Yet, humans love. How’s that for tragedy. I really get this about Carson. To emerge from love is to emerge stripped and trussed. That doesn’t mean you didn’t enjoy yourself. No. To enjoy yourself that much is to be displaced, to appallingly suffer in its aftermath, when it’s over."

— Margaret Christakos, "Slay It Again Anne" via lemonhound.com

Hazel Motes

"... there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there's no truth," he called. “No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place

“Nothing outside you can give you any place,” he said. “You needn’t to look at the sky because it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn’t to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.”

- Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor

Oh, Scrooge

"You fear the world too much," she answered, gently. "All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?"

"What then?" he retorted. "Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you."

She shook her head.

"Am I?"

"Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made, you were another man."

"I was a boy," he said impatiently.

"Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are," she returned. "I am. That which promised happiness when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that we are two. How often and keenly I have thought of this, I will not say. It is enough that I have thought of it, and can release you."

"Have I ever sought release?"

"In words. No. Never."

"In what, then?"

"In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end.  In everything that made my love of any worth or value in your sight."

— A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens